1 result for (book:nopr AND session:648 AND stemmed:world AND stemmed:save AND stemmed:itself)
(On September 25, 1972, the day of the 617th session in Chapter Three, I wrote a note describing how Jane and I had seen and heard geese flying south, in a spectacle both inscrutable and moving. Last night, we had reminders that a natural rhythmic cycle was completing itself six months later: As we retired I thought I heard the barking of geese migrating north, although Jane didn’t. I woke up around four a.m., though, and heard a flight clearly in the silent hour. Then early this morning as I was painting in my studio, that same cadence came sounding down through a fine rain.
[... 9 paragraphs ...]
Man grants rich psychological activity to his own species but denies it in others. There are as many luxuriant and diverse kinds of psychological movement as there are species, however. The cycles of health and disease are felt as rhythms of the body by the large variety of animals, and even with them illness or disease has life-saving qualities on another level.
[... 12 paragraphs ...]
Animals, then, do not think of illness in terms of good or bad. Disease in itself on that level is a part of the life-survival process, and a system of checks and balances. With the emergence of man’s particular kind of consciousness, other issues become involved. Mankind feels its own mortality even more than the beasts do.
[... 1 paragraph ...]
Man forgot the teaching and healing elements, and concentrated instead upon the unpleasant experience itself. To some extent this was quite natural, for the new species developed in order to change the nature of its consciousness, to follow a reality in which instinct was no longer “blindly” followed, and to individualize in strong personal focus corporeal experience that had previously taken a different pattern.
[... 12 paragraphs ...]
When an animal is sick it immediately begins to remedy the situation, and unconsciously it knows what to do. It does not bother thinking in your terms of good and evil. It does not wonder what it did to get into such a situation. It does not think of itself as inferior. It automatically begins its own therapy.
A human being, however, has another dimension to deal with, a new area of creativity, a diverse mixture of beliefs. His or her ideas about the self must be examined, for they are being materialized in flesh. Again, the situation has great complexity, for the condition is still a healthy attempt on the part of the body to maintain balance. Overall there is also the world situation to be taken into consideration — the status of the species on the planet, in which, say, overpopulation problems will bring about death to insure new growth.
[... 11 paragraphs ...]
What you consider conscience is often an applied-from-without sense of right and wrong instilled in you in your youth. As a rule these ideas represent your parents’ conceptions of natural guilt, distorted by their own beliefs. (See the 619th session in Chapter Four, as well as the first session in this chapter.) You accepted those ideas for a reason, individually and en masse, for mankind at any given “time” has a strong idea of the particular sort of world experience it will create.
[... 8 paragraphs ...]
Their migration is perfect in its simplicity and complexity, yet your journey as a species is far less predictable, opening avenues of probabilities in which your consciousness and free will allows you to become conscious creators in worlds that you initiate and then inhabit.
[... 5 paragraphs ...]